This blog is all about words because they matter, they influence, they entertain and when you put them down on a page in a meaningful order, they acquire permanence. Contained here are a bunch of written words in the form of book reviews, magazine and web article links & summaries and other stuff I like to write about. Currently aiming to read and write on two books a month.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Great pieces that dealt with humanity - by Mooney, Harding & Deitsch

There's a few pieces of writing I've seen lately that were really well done and for me struck a cord in the humanity showed in them. Also very much related to this idea of humanity was a request on twitter that's generated a number of heartwarming responses very much worthy of keeping track of.

The first piece of great writing to to note here was by Michael Mooney for the September issue of D Magazine. "Signs of the Homeless" was about Dallas area man Willie Baronet, who as Mooney wrote "has been buying and collecting signs made by homeless people for 20 years" and it's a tremendously interesting read that trafficks in the ideas of charity, commerce and contribution.

Another piece of excellent recent writing was from the Washington Post on September 7th. "Hiding in N. Virginia, a daughter of Auschwitz" was written by Thomas Harding tells the story of Brigitte Höss, the now elderly daughter of Rudolf Höss, Kommandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The piece is a pretty amazing one and Harding towards the end of it included a quote that very much made me think of this aforementioned theme of humanity. Speaking of Brigitte, the son of a Jewish Virginia couple who employed her even knowing who her father was said "she is a human being, she was not responsible for her father."

The final thing to note on this subject of humanity came out of a Twitter request by Sports Illustrated writer Richard Deitsch with him asking people for pictures of the "single best moment in their lives". The resulting flood of images resulted in multiple stories on it with several of the pieces that included a number of the images being ones by CNN, by Fast Company, by The Chive and by the San Diego Union-Tribune.

There are a ton of great images that I've seen retweeted from this request and below are a few of the tweets that particularly struck me...